Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday November 10, 2011 @12:11PM
from the did-you-bring-enough-for-everyone-to-steal? dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times explores some of the best ways to teach kids and finds that some of the new tools are encouraging the kids to share their work with each other. One teacher first tried to keep the kids quiet and staring at their own monitors but found it was better to let them copy each other. He calls MIT's Scratch a 'gateway' tool. Then the article points out that programming Blender with Python is not as hard to pick up as your grandparent's programming languages — and kids today are learning them in a few months." The Wikipedia entry on Scratch is worth reading, too.

Sounds like a great way for the teacher to make other students do the job of the teacher. I certainly don't want my son going to school and spending the majority of his time teaching rather than learning something new under some false assumption that they can all be winners. As the kid who always held the class record for math speed tests in elementary school, its a shitty teacher that would make that me spend most of my time helping other students on rudimentary problems when I could have instead moved on to something more challenging.

I want kids to go to school to learn, not teach remedial topics to their classmates.

One of the best ways to solidify one's grasp of a topic is to teach it to someone else. Additionally, everyone has a different method of presenting information to others, and some people are more receptive to different methods of learning. Ideally, students of similar levels of aptitude would be paired together to learn from each other, increasing the knowledge of both, but we all know that the real world does not revolve around ideal situations at all times.

An educationalist is someone who researches education, or shapes education policy. It's somewhere in between "education expert" and "education policy czar / ivory tower education academic" in flamebaitness. "Educationalist" *is* a word, in relatively common use (Google tells me it's about half as common as "critical theory" (in quotes) on the web), unlike flamebaitness which I just made up.

I won't be pedantic, and go into any detail as to what the definition of "word" is, as there are several different meanings, one of which ("a word in common use") which makes some kind of sense in the way you are using it.